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Bopy, THE GAZE, AND ABSTRACTION: FROM SAMUEL BECKETT TO BRUCE NAUMAN absent, as if to point to the “angle of immunity”!° which, situated behind the viewer’s back, allows for unified representation to take form in accordance with the laws of perspective. Movement here is considered independently of any notion of place or sight. The alternation between north and south involves that of the bust and each leg successively pointing in opposite directions. This splitting is itself enveloped in an overall division: in order to head from west to east, Watt must alternate between north and south, describing a line perpendicular to the former. He also advances in a pointedly paradoxical way: “headlong tardigrade.”" It thus seems that Watt does not move forward, but rather executes radiating gestures. The adverbial complements are revealing: with each movement, Watt seeks to “turn” and “fling” “as far as possible.” It is as if he were seeking, on the one hand, to attain maximal extension in space, in order to reach the point of absolute north or south and, on the other hand, to ascertain the limits of what Beckett calls elsewhere “the field of the possible.” This also means that Watt’s walking supposes an initial, overall calculation, whereby he decides on a destination, and submits himself to the arduous task of “tacking”: accepting a form of detour that excludes any reference to tangible space. ABSTRACTION The abstract, geometrical division of space, which frames the movement of Beckett’s characters, is omnipresent in his work. In What Where and ...but the clouds..., the cardinal points determine the playing area, while the woman in Rockaby searches for an alter ego, turning her eyes systematically along horizontal and vertical axes: “all eyes / all sides / high and low.”* Her “going to and fro” repeats the “come and go” motif that, in the incipit of A Piece of Monologue, is associated with the original inscription in human existence:"® “Birth was the death of him. [...] From mammy to nanny and back. All the way. Bandied back and forth. So ghastly grinning on.”"® 10 Samuel Beckett: Film, in The Complete Dramatic Works, London, Faber & Faber, 2006, 324. HU Beckett: Watt, 30. 2 Ibid. 13 Samuel Beckett: Disjecta, London, John Calder, 1983, 139. Samuel Beckett: Rockaby, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 435. Taken, for example, from Job 1:7 (cf. Chris Ackerley’s notes on Texts for Nothing, Paris, Lettres modernes — Minard, La Revue des Lettres modernes; Serie Samuel Beckett, no. 5. 2018, # 3.4). Samuel Beckett: A Piece of Monologue, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 425. * 103
